The interdisciplinary field of Discrete Event Systems (DES) combines different formalisms,
methodologies and tools from control, computer science and operations research.
The research activity in this field is driven by the needs of many different
application domains: manufacturing, process control, supervisory systems, embedded and
networked systems, software engineering, transportation, and so on.
After an initial DES Workshop in Amherst, USA, in 1991, the WODES series of international workshops on
Discrete Event Systems was formally started in 1992. Since then it has been held every other year in Europe.
WODES'04, held in Reims, France, in September 2004,
was highly successful with 77 papers presented and over 130 attendees from 23 countries.
The 8th edition of WODES is coming to the USA in 2006, in Ann Arbor on the campus of the
University of Michigan, July 10-12. It will provide researchers from different fields
(control theoreticians and control engineers, software engineers and computer scientists,
operations research specialists) with an opportunity to exchange information and new ideas,
and to discuss new developments in the field of DES theory and application.
